DISQUS

E. Christopher Clark · 11 months ago

Great article, Brandice. I actually had no idea that Blip was capable of so much (which is surprising, seeing as I have a friend or two who distribute exclusively through them).

brandice · 11 months ago

Thanks. :) I'm glad to have highlighted some options you may not have known about, whether you decide they're the best for you or not. :)

Mario · 11 months ago

Thank you for this interesting in-depth-article about all the video services, Brandice. Sometimes when I was uploading to Youtube lately it felt a little bit like cheating, because of the community. Of course this is totally nonsense.
Again, thanks for sharing your experiences.

brandice · 11 months ago

Glad you liked the write-up. :)

And you're right, it's total nonsense to feel like you're cheating. you should be using the absolute best service for you, and maybe that changes from day to day based on what you want... embed whatever you want, I say. :)

LauraDameeks · 11 months ago

Hmm, I've been thinking about getting back into making videos, and now you're making me wonder where I should be posting them. I have a Vimeo account, mostly because I wanted to share some India videos with co-workers, but didn't want to give them my Viddler account. I like the site.

Blergh, we may have to have a conference about this.

brandice · 11 months ago

The other thing to keep in mind are things like Qik, because if you're not going to edit the video and it's more important to just get a tiny blip out there, Qik does ALL of the work for you and it's live at the time and then saved immediately online (and crossposted to YouTube automatically if you want). Live video that is autosaved is what I plan to use for the little stuff like weightoday or metoday, etc. because it's EASY.

Colin Devroe · 11 months ago

Thanks for your honest remarks. We're always striving to do better and I hope that I can parse through the information here and turn these into goals for us internally.

I'm sorry you're having uploading issues. We're not getting a lot of support issues in that area and we are processing more videos on a daily basis than ever before. We'll be doing an update soon and then I'll loop back with you to see if that resolved your issue(s).

brandice · 11 months ago

What's important to remember about what is frustrating in what I mentioned above: the service, not the issue. It doesn't matter if there are less problems if the problems that DO occur aren't dealt with in an absolutely stellar way, and that is where Viddler is missing the boat and has been in ways that you and I have talked about in the past. The timely, consistent, and extremely polite technical support is not there, and without it, Viddler will never have that amazing aura that Brightkite and other small but extremely service-oriented companies have about them.

"Small company" is not an excuse, especially when the complaint is not being able to upload at all (with at least one other person having the same problem), and Jason throwing a halfhearted "is your flash updated" at me and having Derek suggest that I restart my computer is just kind of insulting, especially given that it's ME (I mean, come on).

Quality assurance... have you looked at groups? I hadn't really realized just how bad they are until browsing through some of those other video sites and realizing that Viddler's groups are absolutely out of control and nothing but spam. Look at the tags cloud on the "browse groups" page and every new group is spam. Quality assurance (and you know who that is) doesn't catch mispellings or a million little bugs that make Viddler seem glitchy instead of smooth sailing compared to these other sites.

QA and technical support (not what Rachel's doing, actual TECH support, including a functional and helpful FAQ written and maintained by tech staff) are going to bury you guys soon if you don't get it under control. I had no idea that there was such a stark difference until seeing how many of those issues *aren't* issues on other sites.

Colin Devroe · 11 months ago

!00% agreed. So you know, we're hiring in both of the QA and Support positions at the moment. We realize this is our biggest hole - and are working to correct it.

Your input is invaluable Brandice. Always has been. I'm hoping that you're always as free with advice as you have been for so long - no matter how good we react to it - so that we at least have the chance to catch our biggest faults.

edwinv · 11 months ago

Another great write up Brandice. I'm glad you were honest about your write up regarding Viddler. As much as I love them, they've started to drop off in ways you mentioned above. With that being said, I will probably stick with them just because of the community.

brandice · 11 months ago

I think I'll always crosspost to them regardless of who I embed on my blog with. I don't think it really matters who you embed with on your site, but if you want interaction from the other members of a video hosting service, Viddler is a definite must right now.

Glad you enjoyed the write-up! :)

Christopher Masto · 3 months ago

Do you still think blip.tv is the way to go? I really want to post my videos to someplace with an iTunes compatible feed.

brandice · 3 months ago

From what I know (and I'm not necesssarily as up to date on things as I used to be), Blip is still a good way to go, with at least a crosspost to YouTube. Given that YouTube is the main service that plays nice with the iPhone, I really think it's a must.

Let me know if you've got a fun video project in the works... I don't want to miss it! :)